Carefully review your reworked assignment alongside your first effort and make notes in your learning log about what you've learned during the reworking process.
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Tutor / My Comments - Assignment 3
Overall Comments
It might be as well to have a look at the
brief for the final assignment as you might find that the summer period
supplies the greatest opportunities for its completion and forward planning is
never wasted!
Feedback on assignment
This certainly has the
look and feel of similar articles in many of the county magazines I have
seen. This may be taken as a positive or
negative criticism or (this is the correct choice) both. If you are looking to maximise your local
commercial potential then there is a good argument that looking like all the
others is the way to go, just remember the photo-journalists’ adage “f8 and be
there”.
However, if an editor has
submissions from two hopefuls, why would they choose yours? (I am not really
speaking directly to your submission but in general) You need to have something that stands out,
that is your signature that the
editor will remember and commission signature that the editor will remember and
commission you rather than anyone else.
So I would like to have
seen you push the boundaries a bit. You
should, perhaps, try to make it unique to Lyme Regis, to your particular town
crier, and make it appeal to those from outside as well as those from Lyme
itself.
Your images are well
composed in general, correctly exposed and focused and so on so you have the
basic skills, you have done the research on town criers in general and done a
good interview with your chosen subject, what we need to see is your personal
take on the whole thing. (I confess that
I feel that a lot of editors on local magazines and so on aren’t interested in
anything original but then I am just an old cynic!)
I feel you have been ambivalent in writing your comments about my
work. I put a lot of effort into
creating relevant images in a format that I think would be of interest to local
and county publications. It’s almost as
if you are afraid of upsetting me with negative comments.
My images showed the town crier as he goes about his daily tasks for the
benefit of the town. If you are looking
for extreme images of him then I’m afraid you would be disappointed, what I
showed was a generous man prepared to give his time to the town he represents
and extending his generosity to me, allowing me to follow him around and also
set up various scenarios in situations that I thought would be relevant.
I really do feel that you
should be shooting in RAW. As you are
using Lightroom, any adjustments that need to be made to large numbers of your
images to adjust for your particular camera, for example to deal with slight
de-saturation of the colour, adding capture sharpening, lens correction, etc
etc. can be set up as a preset and applied to all at once as can exporting to
your preferred j[eg settings or to a required setting for a particular
client. But you still have all the
original image to work with at another time and for another project. Why have a camera that shoots umpteen
megapixels only to have half of them thrown away and why rely on someone else’s
idea of how an image should look?
I have adjusted my camera to take RAW and JPG images simultaneously and
will concentrate on the RAW images using the JPG for reference. This caused a problem with my Photoshop
software as CS5, which was the version I was using doesn’t support my Nikon
D5200 camera. After various searches on
Photoshop forums and a phone call to Adobe, I had to accept that I needed to upgrade
my software. As a student I was offered
a deal with Creative Cloud for one application at £8.95 per month for 12 months
so opted for that. After two weeks I was
told that this price would be indefinitely and they also threw in Adobe
Lightroom version 5 for free. It seemed
the best solution at the time so I took it and can now convert the RAW files
from my camera with no problem.
Just a couple of general
thoughts. All lenses work at their
optimum sharpness etc at about middle apertures; this usually means around
f8. Digital lenses are particularly poor
at the extremes and most consumer lenses really do loose sharpness when used at
maximum aperture or at f16 and smaller.
However, except with full frame sensors, depth of field is always large
so it is difficult to use differential focus effects to isolate the main
subject and at f8 depth of field is pretty enormous even when using a longish
focal length. So either one has to
accept this, in your images, at least the final ones, you have accepted this
and included the background, crowds etc. as a major part of the subject, or
compromise on sharpness and use the widest aperture available and as long a
focal length as is feasible when differential focus is a needed technique.
I have taken on board your comments regarding focal lengths and hope it
shows in my future assignments.
Another thing is avoidance
of noise in areas of even tone/colour and particular in low light levels. Not that noise is a problem in any of your
images here. It is worth remembering
that changing the ISO is just like turning the volume up on a radio, the music
gets louder but so does any hiss and crackle.
So the advice is to use the native ISO of the sensor (usually the lowest
setting but not always) and only raise the ISO when it is impossible to do
otherwise. What prompted me to mention
this was seeing that you had used 400ISO for an outside shot where you could as
easily used a wider aperture and a slower shutter speed with a lower ISO.
A final point is about the
use of wide angle at close quarters. If
you look at your shot Preparing you
can see that the photos on the wall form a bit of an arc and the hands are
rather out of proportion. Neither of
these things are particularly distracting in this particular shot, but, be
aware of this effect in future where it might spoil the shot. It’s all about training your eye.
I think that you should
put thumbnails as contact sheets in your assessment submission. The learning log is perhaps the best place
for them with comments on your choices.
It will help to give the assessors the same sort of idea of the way you
work and the sort of reasoning for your choices as your submissions to me do.
I have now produced thumbnail sheets using Adobe Bridge as there is no
File/Automate/sheets in the new version of Photoshop CC.
Learning Logs/Critical
essays
Now you are back in
harness as it were, I would like to see even more in your blog about books you
are reading/consulting, magazine and/or Internet sites you have visited and
read, exhibitions (real and virtual) and so on in relation to your own work. Discussing things that are more or less
connected to your photography practice is a vital part of a good learning log/blog.
I have attempted to keep up my learning blog and am hoping to be more
involved with study days, both with the South West group and general
photographic days. I have booked myself
on the Hayward Gallery study day at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank on
December 7th.
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